Within every business segment at Atlantic, our employees are the foundation of our success. We are very fortunate to have a highly skilled technical service team focused on providing solutions to our customers. Beyond their daily efforts of installation, calibration, and trouble-shooting, they deliver significant value by supporting our commitment to innovation and process improvement.

Eric FarmerVP Product & Sales

Eric Farmer

Eric came to Atlantic in 1994. He was a young newlywed, 25 years old, joining the company after a 2 1/2 year start with Roadway in operations. His first assignment was to open and operate Atlantic’s 3rd branch in Winston-Salem, NC.

Atlantic was a small company at the time and Eric spent his early years training and learning from Rusty, Bill, Geoff, Mike and others. In the mid- 90’s, the textile industry was still heavily entrenched in the Carolinas and the Southeast. Thanks to Rusty, Mike, and others, Atlantic was established as an excellent supplier in the textile industry with several key customers. It was during this period that Eric became exposed to these customers and the industry.

Thanks to Atlantic’s investment in technical resources, some collaborative development with a key film partner, and a commitment from Atlantic's equipment partners, Atlantic developed a unique expertise in supporting the handling and shipping of fabric and cut-parts for textile customers. This expertise involved a skilled team of Atlantic technicians, engineers and sales professionals.

The early relationships established by Rusty and Mike grew over time with help from this team and Atlantic evolved into a company with a greater depth of offerings including printed paperboard packaging, printed pressure sensitive labels, sophisticated end-of-line packaging equipment solutions, flexible packaging, and a wide variety of cutting room papers. As the textile industry exited the Carolinas and the Southeast in the mid-2000’s, Atlantic invested heavily in facilities, equipment, and people to continue supporting these key customers in Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Over 20 years with Atlantic, Eric has managed Atlantic facilities in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Charlotte. During this time, Atlantic’s service platform and offering for the textile industry has grown dramatically. Eric is proud to be a part of the large and talented team that serves this industry for Atlantic today.

Not Just Wrench Turners.

The level of technical service we offer at Atlantic is unsurpassed among our competitors. Our strategy of investing in expertise and assembling a group of technicians who are experts in their fields of stretch wrapping, shrink packaging, integration, and general packaging equipment helps our customers achieve their goals of improving productivity and uptime while reducing waste and preventing product damage.

Our technical service team works closely with our sales team to deliver the results that are promised. We go the extra mile when it comes to servicing equipment, matching films, testing and monitoring performance, and providing the training and education necessary to ensure long-term success.

Experience & Dedication

Atlantic has made an investment in assembling the most talented packaging technicians in the industry. This has been a strategic effort that allows us to make a long term, powerful commitment to our customers.

Experience

The majority of our technicians have been working in their fields for decades. Their many years of experience mean that they understand packaging equipment, materials, and application and have observed how they operate under various conditions. They have seen developments and upgrades over the years and have the context to understand what process will work best for any application.

Dedication

What sets our technicians apart from the rest, in addition to their experience, is their dedication to delivering a complete package in terms of equipment, materials, application, and training. They do everything it takes to make sure a customer is set up for success.

This includes determining exactly what a customer needs, setting up their equipment so it operates at peak performance, testing the process, observing what those results are, documenting those results to determine a benchmark to go back to, then maintaining the customer's equipment to make sure those benchmarks continue to be met (see: MUST Stretch Wrap Monitoring).

As a customer grows, Atlantic technicians can make recommendations and implement upgrades, improvements, and changes to ensure that the packaging line will keep up with production.

Experience and dedication deliver an exceptional partnership in packaging.

Audit

One of the elements that makes our technicians such an important asset to our customers is the time they take to observe and audit existing conditions with the packaging line, equipment, materials, and machine operators.

Understanding your Goals

The audit process is key to having our sales and technical team understand our customers’ goals in terms of resolving any issues they are experiencing, helping them achieve better performance, and reducing costs.

Finding Opportunities

Auditing also allows our technicians to find opportunities for improvement and optimization, whether that’s with the equipment, the materials, the application, or some combination of each of those. The troubleshooting process starts here as the technicians learn more about the product, how it’s being packaged and shipped, and the particular packaging application of film, strapping, bagging, or taping.

Our field service technicians will solve any issues involving equipment, whether that means changes with programming or mechanical adjustments. Our guys are the best in the business.

Chip BennettVP Engineering Automation

Chip Bennett

It is no exaggeration to say that Chip has lifelong experience working with packaging equipment. Growing up in Long Island and then North Carolina, Chip worked for his father’s shrink equipment company and started building shrink wrappers in his teens. He mastered mechanical and electrical engineering throughout his 18 years with the company and developed several shrink packaging designs with his father that were patented over the years.

The technical expertise he gained with packaging equipment and the relationship he formed with Pat Caccavella during that time led to a career move over to Atlantic in 2007.

Chip started here as an Equipment Sales Specialist and soon after joined the Senior Management group, taking on a role in running Atlantic’s Equipment and Technical Division. Chip brought a new level of structure and organization to our growing technical service and integration programs. He has continued growing this sector of Atlantic’s service offering and also works as a project manager and hands-on with programming, integration, design, testing, troubleshooting, and customizing equipment solutions for our customers.

Optimization

Once our sales and technical team complete an audit of existing equipment, materials, and application, they get to work finding ways to optimize the process. That can mean making adjustments to existing equipment or recommending new equipment, finding better films to fit the application, finding ways to make a package using less film and materials, improving throughput, and training operators and maintenance personnel on proper setup of the machines.

Ultimately, our goals are for your packaging line to run smoothly without downtime and for you to have educated, knowledgeable machine operators and maintenance crew.

Training and Efficiency

Atlantic technicians provide extensive training so that the operators and maintenance crew understand how the equipment works, what makes it work, and how to either troubleshoot problems themselves, or how to best communicate any issues so our technicians can help solve them quickly and efficiently.

Empowering our customers with knowledge and technical skills on packaging equipment is a critical part of our optimization process.

Optimization means making the equipment and the product both run best to ensure that the loads get to where they're going without product failure.

Ken FieldsStretch Systems Optimization

Ken Fields

With 30 years in the packaging industry and almost all of that time dedicated to stretch wrapping equipment, Ken is truly an expert in the field and is known to be one of the best technicians in the business.

Crediting both a sincere interest in stretch packaging and strong training early on, Ken has excelled at mastering the mechanics of the equipment and also at stretch film application. His experience over the years has taught him the value of observing equipment and processes to find the source of any issues and to think outside the box when it comes to finding solutions. Ken is always willing to explain and demonstrate his recommendations and to help educate our customers on their stretch packaging operation.

Ken has learned many things over the course of his career. One of the most important has been how to properly apply film for loads that will result in the lowest cost and the best performance. But, overall, Ken maintains that his focus on the customer - and not just the machine - is the key to his success. Whenever he leaves a job site, Ken makes sure that he has completely taken care of his customer and the packaging operation, helping to solve problems that extend even beyond the machine itself. This type of customer service defines Ken’s dedication and the level of care our customers can expect from Atlantic.

Process Improvement

The most important step we take in achieving this is in earning the trust and confidence of our customers. We are dedicated to explaining our process so our customer understands why we make the recommendations we make. We provide demonstrations to illustrate concepts, we test materials and applications to back up our theories with data, and we ultimately provide measurable results.

We have technicians who are experts in specific fields of packaging, such as shrink packaging and stretch wrapping, and we also have excellent general technicians who can work on all types of packaging equipment. Our techs work together and support each other to solve problems, troubleshoot issues, and create improvements.

When our customers come to trust our sales, technical, and support teams, we create a remarkable partnership that thrives on reliability and results.

When we work with a customer, we streamline his equipment, we improve the package appearance, we improve the throughput, and we also train the operators and the maintenance crew on the proper set up and service of the machine. We want them to run 24/7 without any issues and we've been very successful at that.

Ray MclaurinShrink Systems

Ray Mclaurin

While we attempt to acquire footage of 1980’s Ray, with his Alabama-style long hair, starting his career in mechanical and electrical maintenance, you can rest assured that his proficiency as a technician and consultant started strong and has only grown over time.

After discovering an affinity for mechanics at a young age, Ray started working for UPS in 1985 after 4 years in the army and 2 years going to UNCG for electrical engineering. He was a maintenance mechanic for UPS and then a project manager and supervisor responsible for maintaining a 6-½ mile conveyor system running through the facility. He left the company in 1997 and found that the packaging field was in need of service technicians.

Ray made his way to Atlantic in 2000 and, though he has the ability to work on any piece of packaging machinery, he has become our resident shrink packaging specialist alongside Randy Franklin. Ray covers installation, operator training, troubleshooting, consulting, and preventative maintenance for our shrink packaging customers.